Merissa Clyde is the Managing Director, Health Benefits Administration at SEIU 775 Benefits Group, which serves over 50,000 caregivers through health and wellness programs. She joins us in this edition of “What They’re Watching” to discuss new behavioral health programs.

“One of our big focus areas over the last couple of years has been piloting different kinds of behavioral health programs that are new and a little bit different. So, we are able to now, after we’ve piloted a few, start to scale them to our full population, including a couple that are really interesting. One is a text based coaching app that allows people to access behavioral health coaching and actually just life coaching within 30 to 45 seconds of downloading the app. They can actually be texting and talking with a coach who can provide them support, wherever really and in however they need it. And then if they need another level of behavioral health specialty support the coach will go through a process by which they assess that and then they connect them (all through the app) to video chat services with a licensed provider and that is done on average within four days. We’re really excited about the increase in access because we were looking at people waiting more than a month sometimes to get into specialty behavioral health. So that’s one area that we’re super excited about. And then we’re also really excited about an online mindfulness program that we put into place that’s showing really strong outcomes in reducing anxiety and depression in the population.”